‘Some flaws in his basic literacy’: Donald Trump at a rally in Nashville.
Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP

How Trump thinks? Some would say he’s incapable of it. Ignorant and incurious, given to impromptu rants, jerked to and fro by a cabal of conspiracy theorists, shock jocks and doom-mongers, he is the very epitome of thoughtlessness. Beneath that curvaceous quiff, behind that permatanned pout, his mind is a broiling elemental chaos.

There’s no telling what Trump thinks because he takes opposite views of all subjects, sometimes simultaneously. Yet despite his blundering incoherence and his self-destructive behaviour, his rise to power has a grim inevitability. What matters is how he prevailed: he is, as Oborne and Roberts suggest in their study of his anthologised tweets, a logical product of the technology that now dominates society and invades our heads.

Television gave this monster a forum. Reality shows warp our perception of the real world, and Trump’s performances in The Apprentice convinced Americans that a tycoon with a propensity for tantrums and an inability to control himself could somehow govern their multifarious republic. Then Trump discovered Twitter, a bird-brained medium designed, as one of its inventors admitted, to broadcast “short bursts of inconsequential information”. During his presidential campaign, with thumbs in overdrive, Trump used his phone to emit a rat-a-tat-tat of threats, boasts and slanders. Alarmingly, these Twitter fusillades were often sent out in the sleepless hours before dawn: like other would-be dictators, Trump is a night worker, profiting from the dozy insentience of his subjects.

Since his inauguration, the executive orders he so intemperately and often ineffectually signs are tweets by other means, allowing him to bypass the legitimate checks and balances of the constitution. Should we think of the bombs and missiles in the arsenal he commands as tweets with nuclear warheads attached?

When Mandela died, Trump alleged that he’d enjoyed “a wonderful relationship” with this great martyr of conscience

It all began as a trivial and tacky marketing exercise. An early Trump tweet entreated his followers to watch Melania tout her bling on a shopping channel after midnight. Trump next placed his own aroma on sale: he announced a bottled fragrance by tweeting “I have captured the sweet smell of success”. Gradually the pitch became more grandiose. Trump commended his auto-hagiography Think Like a Champion as “inspiring, entertaining and a great read” – perhaps not such an immodest utterance, since he didn’t write the memoir he was peddling.

Oborne and Roberts single out one particular tweet that displays the man, in their words, at his “most repulsive”. When Nelson Mandela died, Trump alleged that he’d enjoyed “a wonderful relationship” with this great martyr of conscience, a modern secular saint. Never mind that they’d hardly met: they were both celebrities, which raised them above the lumpen status of those Trump sniffily calls “civilians” – a category that includes the dimwit have-nots who elected him president.

Elsewhere, Trump can be found claiming that unknown authorities have declared him the world’s finest writer (with the proviso that his literary output should not exceed 140 characters). Certainly there is art, or sneaky artifice, in his tweeting. As if composing sinister haikus, he relies on the form’s brevity to hint at crimes that remain inexplicit: insidious inverted commas point to the skulduggery of his enemies while proclaiming falsehoods of Trump’s own making. In 2011, Trump noted that Obama had called Hawaii his “birthplace”. The commas, as Oborne and Roberts remark, “cast doubt or suggest dishonesty”, bolstering the bogus theory that Obama was a native of Kenya and therefore ineligible to be president. In 2016, even more maliciously, Trump said that a rigged electoral system “allowed Crooked Hillary to get away with ‘murder”’. He used the phrase metaphorically, but meant it to echo “alt-right” accusations that Bill and Hillary had literally ordered the deaths of rivals and renegades.

Watching Trump recover from successive disgraces and fiascos, Oborne and Roberts marvel at his capacity to deflect blame. His defiant game of bluff depends on attributing his own infractions to others. The man who currently rails against “fake news” and its lack of accredited sources long ago mastered the same sleight of hand. In 2012 he tweeted that “an ‘extremely credible source’” had assured him that Obama’s birth certificate, published to disprove the innuendo about Kenya, was fraudulent. Notice how slyly he winked at his mischief-making by deploying those inverted commas to signal untruth.

Whether or not Trump can think, Oborne and Roberts expose some flaws in his basic literacy. In 2013 he proudly retweeted a message that called him “the most superior troll on Twitter”: he assumed that he’d been paid a compliment. Last December, when the Chinese confiscated a US navy drone, he denounced this as “an unpresidented act”. Alas, with its murky mix of self-branding, showbiz and nativist voodoo, it’s Trump’s directionless administration that is unprecedented; all we can do is wait for him to be unpresidented.

And how convenient it is to find that Trump has sketched a scenario for his own ejection from office. Incensed by Obama’s re-election in 2012, he tweeted a call to arms, rallying troops to “march on Washington” and stage “a revolution in this country!” He soon deleted that incautious tirade: it’s good that Oborne and Robert have retrieved it.

• How Trump Thinks: His Tweets and the Birth of a New Political Language by Peter Oborne and Tom Roberts is published by Head of Zeus (£10). To order a copy for £8.50 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99